Good news. The choices for the 2015 “Word of the Year” are more varied than usual, and include a suffix and an emoji. Merriam-Webster picked the suffix “ism,” but not just any “ism.” The dictionary company named the words that had “earned high traffic spikes and big bumps in lookups on its website, specifically socialism, […]
Disorder in the Court
I have to report to jury duty next week, and was reminded of these great legal tidbits taken from Disorder in the Court: Great Fractured Moments in Courtroom History by Charles M. Sevilla (ISBN #: 0393319288). Evidently, people actually said these things in court, word for word. Q: What is your date of birth? A: […]
Is Your Modifier Misplaced?
This is an updated version of a post that appeared in October 2011. What’s wrong here? “Born at the age of 48, the baby was a great joy to the mother.” It’s simple. Unless we have a medical “miracle” here, the mother, not the baby, was 48. In this sentence, the phrase “born at the […]
A Dark and Stormy Contest
One of my favorite contests is the tongue-in-cheek Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. Bulwer-Lytton, a minor Victorian novelist, is credited with popularizing the famous line “it was a dark and stormy night” that the cartoon beagle Snoopy loved so much. The English […]
Word Play Masters
Word Play Masters does a contest each year whereby people take a word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting or changing one letter, and then supply a new definition. The organizers regularly post entries so we can enjoy the creativity all year long. Here are some of my favorites so far this year: […]
Fun with English: Newspaper Headlines
A friend sent these to me. They are supposed to be real newspaper headlines. Enjoy. Bugs Flying Around with Wings are Flying Bugs Statistics Show that Teen Pregnancy Drops off Significantly after Age 25 Federal Agents Raid Gun Shop, Find Weapons Marijuana Issue Sent to a Joint Committee Homicide Victims Rarely Talk to Police 17 […]
